in the UK some people were able to almost use the dole like a UBI during the crushing recession of the late 70s and 80s - take the payments without looking for a new job, and spend the time doing non-profit or low-profit work like art, music or political organizing. What’s changed? UK benefit system is now geared to harrass the long-term unemployed into work, the actual amount of money is much lower than it used to be, and the costs of housing has ballooned due the end of social housing and increasingly hostile laws against squatting.

Understood.

• Cutting a check for everyone without much fuss makes sense, at least in the short term. Long-term: I am too lazy to think or talk about this in further detail, but in short, I think it’s easy to argue that additional structural changes beyond UBI would be needed for equity in society to be established and maintained.
• I agree that implementing UBI today would be a hard sell to many people, not even accounting for the counter politics from anyone right of centre.
• Also, techbros love simplistic solutions to complex issues that let them stop caring and go back to trying to suck from VC money hoses.

I think something like UBI will succeed but it won’t look to us like UBI. Like, maybe it seems stupid, but as far as political systems go, the key is persuasion in absurdity and narrative. To persuade people into UBI it has to be dressed up politically as --something else-- in the same way that all kinds of welfare (social and corporate) tends to get simultaneously denied and reinforced with conflicting narratives.

Once enough disparate and contradictory parties are convinced that “more of the good guys benefit from this than the bad guys”, it gets locked in and becomes political cannon. Until later when the political systems feint undoing it again for a different set of points.